work - life balance

ha ha... what am i talking about.. this is the recent fancy words ( or infact reasons ) most of the IT engineers are using in their day to day life i.e work life ;-)... what exactly work-life balance means... in my company too lot of initatives are taken from top management teams to ensure the employees enjoys a good work life balance... i m wondering why & how this trend has started ?? if we look into the previous generation jobs - for the fact my Dad was working as a Draftsman in Indian Railways ( central government job )... he enjoyed a great work-life balance without much knowledge on that.. this is because of the regular work timing and the less work pressure he had and the most important thing the self - discipline he maintained in the work.. but the current generation jobs are putting lot of pressure on us and forces us to work more than the regular work timings... and the flexi timing concept which is suppose to help us is making our lifes worse... this flexi timing concept induces the thought that we can come in any time & leave out any time... which automatically makes us to come and go late... as the work pressure increases we tend to come early but going late remains the same.... :-(
i hv seen people in my present ( previous jobs too ) who use to strech more than 12 hours ( even 18 hours too ) in front of the dumb idiot box ( hope u know wat i m refering )..
so to conclude its us who destroyed our work life balance and again its us who are trying to restore it back... to enjoy a good work life balance we need to maintain a self disciple.. we need to understand our work pressure and plan accordingly... never compromise on the personal side... :-O